Software

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Google Chrome Extensions and Themes

April 10, 2010 in Electronics, Software | No comments

This day, I had to take a break from programming and designing websites. How do I relax? I upgrade the browser software on my computers! I have upgraded to the latest version of FireFox v3.6.3, and also upgraded Google Chrome to the 5.0.342.9 beta version.

I have been comparing the two browsers all day today, and I have found that FireFox has many more “personas”, and “themes”, than Chrome has, hopefully that will change soon. I am in love with the FireFox Two Little Birds persona. I have settled for the Tibi theme in Chrome, but I don’t really like any of these Chrome themes as much as the FireFox themes and personas. It’s a personal thing, I know…

However, as far as extensions and plug-ins go, now the Chrome allows you to add extensions, Chrome is hands-down the best browser out there as far as I am concerned. Above, you can see a screen shot of me typing this blog post on my Chrome browser. Along the the top, next to the address bar, are all the little icons for all the extensions I have installed.

I have installed the following:

Gmail

Google Voice

Google Buzz

Google Caledar

Google Wave

Facebook

Twitter

IE page

bit.ly

delicious

Sharaholic

Chrome SEO

You can get any of these extensions from this link: https://chrome.google.com/extensions

Happy browsing!

Best iPhone Apps

October 18, 2009 in Electronics, Software | No comments

I love my iPhone so much, I want to buy an Apple computer and write iPhone apps.  But first I will just write blog post about my favorite iPhone apps.

1) Navigon – An excellent GPS turn-by-turn voice navigation system. It includes a points of interest feature that is the best I have used to find restaurants and tourist attractions. 5 stars.

2) WunderRadio – Turns your iPhone into a radio.  It allows you to listen to AM and FM stations across the globe.  I live in Raleigh, NC, and this app lets me listen to FM stations across NC that have spotty reception at my home.  Plus I can listen to all the old AM and FM stations I loved when I was in Chicago! 5 stars

3) WeatherBug – Best weather app for iPhone.  Forecasts and radar maps. 5 stars

4) System Activity Monitor – When some iPhone apps are closed, they do not release all the memory they reserved back to the operating system. This can cause your iPhone apps to run more slowly over time until you ‘reboot’ your iPhone.  But with System Activity Monitor, you can force that memory to be freed up, as well as see what programs are currently running, and look at disk allocation.  5 stars plus

5) Tweetie 2 – the best Twitter app I have used, and I have used over 4 of them.   4 stars

6) Toodledo – A to-do list that can be sync’d with an online version. 4 stars

7) Google app with voice search – Lets you do Google searches on the iPhone just by speaking into the microphone; it has incredibly good speech recognition capabilities.  5 stars

8) WiFiFoFum – Find all the WiFi hotspots around you. Includes details on encryption, and a radar map showing locations of the hotspot. 5 stars

9) WSJ/CNN/iDruge etc- All the news apps for iPhone are excellent. 5 stars

10) TFLN – Texts From Last Night is a humorous collection of mostly drunken texts from college.  5 stars for humor content

11) Ontri – triathlon training log, includes GPS feature to log how far you ride/run, along with an online companion program. 4 stars only because it’s hard to log weight lifting.

12) Swim Log – If your kids swim, this can be a helpful app to track their times. 4 stars because it doesn’t remember names of swim meets and you have to re-enter them for every event.

13) iFitness – if you travel a lot, this is a great app to use for ideas on exercises you can do to keep in shape outside of the gym. 5 stars

What are your favorite apps? Appcraver.com is a fun website if you just can’t get enough apps.

Microsoft Expression Web 2.0 upgrade installation problems…

April 29, 2009 in Software, Website Design | No comments

MORE COMPUTER PROBLEMS!!!  All I do is google for solutions to my computer problems.

This latest problem started innocently enough.  I bought the upgrade to MS Expression Web, version 2, because it had PHP support, which I really needed. I had been using PHP Designer, but I decided to give Expression Web 2.0 a try.

But Expression Web 2.0 would not install, no matter what I did.  It seems Expression Web becomes a part of the MS Office suite when installed, and somehow, I have no IDEA how, my install of MS Office 2007 got corrupted. As a play on the the old saying “A fool and his money are soon parted”, my husband jokes that “A computer and Vivian and lots of software are soon together”.  So yeah, I put a lot of software on my computers.  I admit it. But Office had been working fine…

SO anyhow, after getting calling the Microsoft help line, and exchaning several emails with them, the solution was to do these steps below IN THE EXACT ORDER LISTED:

1) completely uninstall Expression Web 1.0.

2) uninstall MS Office 2007.  But, to completely uninstall MS Office 2007 correctly, I had to use a special tool from MS, even more secret than the Windows Clean Up Utility.  This was emailed to me by MS support.  It’s called Offscrub07.zip. Don’t use this tool unless you are sure you need to.

3) Install Expression Web 2.0.

4) Install MS Office 2007 again.

Good luck if you are having this problem.  This caused me days of frustration. ;-)

Windows Live Woes

April 29, 2009 in Software | No comments

I have been trying to keep up with all the new software freebee’s offered by Windows lately.  The Windows Live suite of tools is very useful if you have a computer running the MS Office suite, and want to share files between work and home using Windows Live Workspace Beta.  Also, the Skydrive feature of Windows Live is extremely useful for transferring files between laptops, work, and home computers.

In trying to update my Windows Live programs on my Vista computer, I ran into yet another problem with Windows Vista.  

I wanted to update my installations of Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Messenger, but now, these programs come packaged in a GIGANTIC installer program from Microsoft, that also offers to install a bunch of other stuff you may or may not want to install at the same time as you upgrade your Live programs.  

The install would get about 83% finished, then rollback completely after it got to the Windows Live Photo Gallery part of the installation.

It took days, but I finally found the solution, and posted it here: Windows Live Installer Error 0×80070643

Next generation search engine…

January 14, 2009 in Software, Website Design | No comments

Today I learned about a new search engine at www.searchme.com. This new search engine uses Flash to show you large snapshots of the websites in the search results so you can see the page before you go to the link. It’s similar to the Apple website or Amazon.com’s “Search Inside” feature in the way it displays multiple search results via images that are selectable by arrows that let you go forward or backward through the search results.
  

Searchme.com search engine
New search engine Searchme.com

It also gives you the page description text just like Google and all the other search engines do, but in this case, you have a much better clue as to whether or not you are going to find what you are looking for before you click on a search result link.

If you have children who are going to use searchme.com, under the preferences menu pick, you can choose to filter adult content. You can also choose the ‘day’ or ‘night’ theme to change the background color of the search results. If you choose the ’searchme lite’ feature, the search results are displayed as thumbnails and text descriptions.

Search me lets you save your favorite pages or search results in ’stacks’. The tutorial video on stacks on the searchme.com site explains how you can put all of the news sites you read on a daily basis into a stack and click through all of them one at a time. Or you can share a stack of vacation ideas with your friend via email, and upload stack HTML code to your blog. Very cool.

I am surprised that this new search engine uses Flash and not Ajax and Javascript to display the results. But I am amazed at all the features it offers. Let me know what you think of it!

Process Explorer, IE7 problems

September 23, 2007 in Software | No comments

Have you ever wanted to know just exactly how many background processes were running on your computer, and what files they had opened? Process Explorer is a new freeware program available now from Microsoft.

 And I have to ask a question of my fellow computer junkies:  How do you fix an IE 7 install that doesn’t ever connect to the net, it just hangs and says ‘connecting….’ forever?  This is on a Win XP SP2 computer that I am trying to update with all the latest Windows updates.  I have tried installing IE7 as directed by this helpful website:  http://ict.cas.psu.edu/training/howto/comm/ie7/installie7.htm and this website: http://www.ie-vista.com/known_issues.html, but upon opening, it just hangs.

I have run CrapCleaner first, I have disabled the AVG anti-virus, I have run IE7 in no add-ons mode, when I try to go to ->tools, ->internet options, ->connections, the program hangs.

 When I open IE7 for the first time after the new install, it hangs on the ‘runonce’ page, just saying ‘connecting…’ forever.

 Can anyone help me?

Expression Web Review update

August 30, 2007 in Software, Website Design | No comments

Well, after using Microsoft Expression Web for a while, I am changing my opinion somewhat… This program has a few significant bugs that need to be fixed before it will be useful at all.

1) Undo function:

Undo does not take you back one step in operations, it takes you all the way back to the state of the file when you opened the file, as if it were a ‘revert’ function, not an ‘undo’ function. Other people have seen this problem and some fixes are mentioned here, but I haven’t tried them yet:

http://blog.by-expression.com/index.php/undo-goes-to-far-in-expression-web/

2) Expression web inserts these characters: 

When EW saves a file that is PHP or CSS, it changes the encoding to  UTF-8 (BOM) from UTF-8….and there is no way to choose the encoding when you save…and this causes those 3 little characters to appear all over your website wherever the PHP pages are…

Thankfully, frontpagewebmaster.com found a solution.

I am pretty upset because I just wasted about 4 hours on these bugs, and I won’t be using Epression Web again for a while.

Flash and WS_FTP compatibility issues with Vista

August 4, 2007 in Software, Website Design | No comments

Well, I finally got most of my web design software installed on my new Vista computer. The first really big compatibility issues I have noticed are with Flash, specifically versions MX2004 and version 8, and WS_FTP Professional.

When opening movie clips in older versions of Flash, the program goes into a weird slow-motion mode, wherein a dotted box slowly expands and contracts around the movie clip you are trying to open. If you have this problem, here is a link explaining the solution.

Also, I upgraded to the supposedly Vista-compatible version of Ipswitch WS_FTP Professional. Well, I was happily coding along in another program when I suddenly got an error message out of nowhere: “WS_FTP does not appear to have been installed correctly for the current user. WS_FTP will now exit.” I wasn’t even running this program!!! To fix this problem, right click on the WS_FTP icon, click on properties, and choose “run this program as administrator.” This seems to have fixed the problem for me. Even though my login IS the administrator.

 


 

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